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Monthly Archives: January 2007

Zaitcev brings up the issue of blog posts that aren’t directly related to free software development in Advogato’s recentlog. I seem to remember this issue coming up sometime in the past. Zaitcev occasionally posts about topics other than free software such as Anime. This annoys ekashp, who would prefer that free software developers limit their interests (or at least their blogs) to posts about free software. For my own part, I don’t find it strange at all that free software developers have varied interests beyond software itself and I enjoy reading about them.

Perhaps I’m biased, becase I too write about whatever random things I find interesting. Sometimes I write about software but just as often it’s music, art, books, or robotics. My case is interesting because my blog is syndicated to both Advogato and to robots.net. I think to meet ekashp’s ideal, I’d have to limit my blog to software development related to robots. Otherwise, I’d risk being off-topic on one of the two sites with any given post. Instead, I throw caution to the wind and assume that if a topic is interesting to me, it might be interesting to someone else too.

In any case, Raph created Advogato’s blog ranking system so that each user could define their own ideal recentlog. If you consistently find someone’s blog uninteresting or annoying, go to their profile page and give their blog a low interest ranking. Blogs ranked below 3 will not show up in your view of the recentlog.

Only a few days left to vote in the 2007 Weblog Awards, aka the bloggies. Voting ends on January 10. Might be nice to nominate WordPress, Pivot, or some other FOSS program for best web application for weblogs. And, I dunno, maybe a vote for Advogato’s recentlog for best community weblog or best group weblog? And don’t forget to throw in a vote for robots.net under a few categories too. Winners will be announced by March 14.

Since I started collecting numbers last year, the highest glxgears results we’d seen for any free software driver was a little over 3,000 FPS. Now we’re begining to see number for the R300 code that has been added to the X.Org radeon driver and we have two reports in the 5,000 – 6,000 FPS range on ATI X800/X850 hardware. These may be the highest glxgears number attained on free software to date (if there are higher ones, hopefully somebody will send us a report). With numbers like that, I think the Ubuntu folks won’t be able to use performance as a reason for switching to proprietary drivers (at least for ATI).

A growing number of reports are showing improvments in the performance of the X.Org Intel graphics driver too.

Meanwhile, the nouveau project, which is busy reverse engineering nVidia’s proprietary hardware, has hit a milestone. They posted a screen shot of their driver successfully running glxgears in late December.

Nouveau also came up in a recent debate on the linux kernel mailing list over proprietary binary drivers. Alan Cox suggested getting nouveau’s DRM module (that’s Direct Rendering Manager, not Digital Restrictions Management) into the kernel ASAP. The DRM module is the kernel side of the X.Org DRI driver. The nouveau folks don’t think the code is quite ready but it’s good to know nVidia 3D acceleration is getting closer.

Not enough good news? The Open Graphics Project took delivery of their first OGD1 development boards and are now in a testing cycle. The development board, which includes two FPGA chips, will have a GPU clock rate of 150MHz. Performance is expected to clock in faster than an ATI Radeon 7000 and a little below the nVidia Ge Force2 GTS. The hardware design is completely open and licensed under the GNU GPL. When the development is completed the design will be moved to custom ASICs, allowing a cheaper (and possibly faster) final board for end users.